Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

Hitler always sat in the same place at meals, with his back to the window, flanked by Press Chief Dietrich and Jodl, with Keitel, Bormann, and Bodenschatz opposite him. Generals, staff officers, adjutants, Hitler’s doctors, and any guests visiting the Führer Headquarters made up the rest of the complement.20 The atmosphere was good in these early days, and not too formal. The mood at this time was still generally optimistic.21 Life in the FHQ had not yet reached the stage where it could be described by Jodl as half-way ‘between a monastery and a concentration camp’.22

  Two of Hitler’s secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski, had also accompanied him to his field headquarters. Christa Schroeder described their life there to a friend, one week after arriving. Their living quarters were very simple. The sleeping section of their bunker was no larger than a compartment in a railway carriage. They had a toilet, a mirror, and a radio, but not much else. There were shower rooms, but without hot water in the early weeks. They had as good as nothing to do. Sleeping, eating, drinking, and chatting filled up most of their day. Some of the men in the otherwise entirely male company of the FHQ soon started to complain that the presence of Hitler’s two under-employed secretaries in the military complex was quite superfluous.23 Much of the secretaries’ energy was spent trying to swat away a constant plague of midges. Hitler complained that his advisers who had picked the spot had chosen ‘the most swampy, midge-infested, and climatically unfavourable area for him’, and joked that he would have to send in the Luftwaffe on the midge-hunt.24 ‘The chief, as those in his daily company called him, was generally in a good mood during the first part of the Russian campaign. He enjoyed light banter with his secretaries. When Christa Schroeder could not find her torch one night, as she emerged into the dark compound, Hitler remarked that she should not think he had stolen it. ‘I’m a country (Ländledieb) thief, not a lamp (Lämpledieb) thief,’ he quipped.25

  How monochrome life in the confines of the Führer Headquarters rapidly became for Hitler’s secretaries was indicated in Christa Schroeder’s comments in a letter to a friend at the end of August: ‘We are permanently cut off from the world wherever we are – in Berlin, on the Mountain [at the Berghof], or on travels. It’s always the same limited group of people, always the same routine inside the fence.’ The danger was, she went on, ‘of losing contact with the real world’. Only the common life of the Wolfsschanze’s inhabitants, revolving around ‘the Chief, held the group together, she wrote. But should Hitler be absent, things immediately fell apart.26

  As in Berlin or at the Berghof, a word during meals on one of Hitler’s favourite topics could easily trigger an hour-long monologue.27 In these early days, he usually faced a big map of the Soviet Union pinned to the wall. At the drop of a hat, he would launch into yet another harangue about the danger that Bolshevism signified for Europe, and how to wait another year would have been too late. On one occasion, his secretaries heard Hitler, as he stood in front of a big map of Europe, point to the Russian capital and say: ‘In four weeks we’ll be in Moscow. Moscow will be razed to the ground.’28 Everything had gone much better than could have been imagined, he remarked. They had been lucky that the Russians had placed their troops on the borders and not pulled the German armies deep into their country, which would have caused difficulties with supplies.29 Two-thirds of the Bolshevik armed forces and five-sixths of the tanks and aircraft were destroyed or severely damaged, he told Goebbels, on the Propaganda Minister’s first visit to Führer Headquarters on 8 July.30 After assessing the military situation in detail with his Wehrmacht advisers, Goebbels noted, the Führer’s conclusion was ‘that the war in the East was in the main already won’.31 There could be no notion of peace-terms with the Kremlin. (He would think differently about this only a month later.) Bolshevism would be wiped out and Russia broken up into its component parts, deprived of any intellectual, political, or economic centre. Japan would attack the Soviet Union from the east in a matter of weeks. He foresaw England’s fall ‘with a sleepwalker’s certainty’. Whether he would take up any offer of a compromise peace from London he could not say.32 On other occasions, even at this early stage, Hitler was less ebullient, betraying signs of uncertainty about the Soviet Union, about which, he said, they knew so little.33

  News came in of 3,500 aircraft and over 1,000 Soviet tanks destroyed. But there was other news of fanatical fighting by Soviet soldiers who feared the worst if they surrendered. Hitler was to tell the Japanese Ambassador Oshima on 14 July that ‘our enemies are not human beings any more, they are beasts’.34 It was, then, doubtless echoing her ‘chief and the general atmosphere in FHQ when Christa Schroeder remarked to her friend that ‘from all previous experience it can be said to be a fight against wild animals’.35

  Hitler had permitted no Wehrmacht reports during the very first days of the campaign.36 But Sunday, 29 June – a week after the attack had started – was, as Goebbels described it, ‘the day of the special announcements’. Twelve of them altogether, each introduced by the ‘Russian Fanfare’ based on Liszt’s ‘Les Préludes’, were broadcast, beginning at 11a.m. that morning.37 Dominance in the air had been attained, the reports proclaimed. Grodno, Brest-Litowsk, Vilna, Kowno, and Dünaburg were in German hands. Two Soviet armies were encircled at Bialystok. Minsk had been taken. The Russians had lost, it was announced, 2,233 tanks and 4,107 aircraft. Enormous quantities of matériel had been captured. Vast numbers of prisoners had been taken. But the popular reception in Germany was less enthusiastic than had been hoped. People rapidly tired of the special announcements, one after the other, and were sceptical about the propaganda. Instead of being excited, their senses were dulled. Goebbels was furious at the OKW’s presentation, and vowed that it would never be repeated.38

  The invasion of the Soviet Union, for which, as we have seen, there had in contrast to previous campaigns been of necessity no prior manipulation of popular opinion, was presented to the German public as a preventive war. This had been undertaken by the Führer, so Goebbels’s directives to the press ran, to head off at the last minute the threat to the Reich and the entire western culture through the treachery of ‘Jewish-Bolshevism’. At any moment the Bolsheviks had been planning to strike against the Reich and to overrun and destroy Europe. Only the Führer’s bold action had prevented this.39 More extraordinary than this propaganda lie is the fact that Hitler and Goebbels had convinced themselves of its truth.40 Fully aware of its falseness, they had to play out a fiction even among themselves to justify the unprovoked decision to attack and utterly destroy the Soviet Union.

  By the end of June the German encirclements at Bialystok and Minsk had produced the astonishing toll of 324,000 Red Army prisoners, 3,300 tanks, and 1,800 artillery pieces captured or destroyed. Little over a fortnight later the end of the battle for Smolensk doubled these figures.41 Already by the second day of the campaign, German estimates put numbers of aircraft shot down or destroyed on the ground at 2,500. When Göring expressed doubts at the figures they were checked and found to be 200–300 below the actual total.42 After a month of fighting, the figure for aircraft destroyed had reached 7,564.43 By early July it was estimated that eighty-nine out of 164 Soviet divisions had been entirely or partially destroyed, and that only nine out of twenty-nine tank divisions of the Red Army were still fit for combat.44

  The scale of underestimation of Soviet fighting potential would soon come as a severe shock. But in early July it was hardly surprising if the feeling in the German military leadership was that ‘Barbarossa’ was on course for complete victory, that the campaign would be over, as predicted, before the winter. On 3 July Halder summed up his verdict in words which would come to haunt him: ‘It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.’ He did at least have the foresight to acknowledge that this did not mean that it was over: ‘The sheer geographical vastness of the country and the stubbornness of the resistance, which is carried on with all means, will claim our efforts for many more weeks t
o come.’45

  II

  The territorial gains brought about by the spectacular successes of the Wehrmacht in the first phase of ‘Barbarossa’ gave Hitler command over a greater extent of the European continent than any ruler since Napoleon. His power and might were at their peak. In his lunchtime or late-night monologues to his regular retinue in the Führer Headquarters, he revealed few, if any, signs of the wear and tear on his nerves which growing conflict with his army leaders and shifting fortunes at the front would cause during the coming weeks. His rambling, discursive outpourings were the purest expression of unbounded, megalomaniac power and breathtaking inhumanity. They were the face of the future in the vast new eastern empire, as he saw it.

  ‘The beauty of the Crimea,’ he rhapsodized late at night on 5 July 1941, would be made accessible to Germans through a motorway. It would be their version of the Italian or French riviera.46 Every German, after the war, he remarked, had to have the chance with his ‘People’s Car’ (Volkswagen) personally to see the conquered territories, since he would have ‘to be ready if need be to fight for them’. The mistake of the pre-war era of limiting the colonial idea to the property of a few capitalists or companies could not be repeated. Roads would be more important in the future than the railways for passenger transport. Only through travel by road could a country be known, he asserted.47

  He was asked whether it would be enough to stretch the conquests to the Urals. ‘Initially’, that would suffice, he replied. But Bolshevism had to be exterminated, and it would be necessary to carry out expeditions from there to eradicate any new centres that might develop. ‘St Petersburg’ – as he called Leningrad – ‘was as a city incomparably more beautiful than Moscow.’48 But its fate, he decided, was to be identical to that of the capital. ‘An example was to be made here, and the city will disappear completely from the earth.’ It was to be sealed off, bombarded, and starved out.49 He imagined, too, that little would ultimately be left of Kiev. He saw the destruction of Soviet cities as the basis for lasting German power in the conquered territories.50 No military power was to be tolerated within 300 kilometres east of the Urals.51 ‘The border between Europe and Asia,’ he stated, ‘is not the Urals but the place where the settlements of Germanic types of people stop and pure Slavdom begins. It is our task to push this border as far as possible to the east, and if necessary beyond the Urals.’52

  Hitler thought the Russian people fit for nothing but hard work under coercion.53 ‘The Slavs,’ he declared, ‘were a rabbit-family (Kaninchenfamilie) who would never proceed beyond the family association if not forced to do so by a ruling class. Their natural and desired condition was one of general disorganization.’54 ‘The Ukrainians,’ he remarked on another occasion, ‘were every bit as idle, disorganized, and nihilistically asiatic as the Greater Russians.’ To speak of any sort of work ethic was pointless. All they understood was ‘the whip’. He admired Stalin’s brutality. The Soviet dictator, he thought, was ‘one of the greatest living human beings since, if only through the harshest compulsion, he had succeeded in welding a state out of this Slavic rabbit-family’.55 He described ‘the sly Caucasian’ as ‘one of the most extraordinary figures of world history’, who scarcely ever left his office but could rule from there through a subservient bureaucracy.56

  Hitler’s model for domination and exploitation remained the British Empire. His inspiration for the future rule of his master-race was the Raj. He voiced his admiration on many occasions for the way such a small country as Great Britain had been able to establish its rule throughout the world in a huge colonial empire. British rule in India in particular showed what Germany could do in Russia. It must be possible to control the eastern territory with a quarter of a million men, he stated. With that number the British ruled 400 million Indians. Russia would always be dominated by German rulers. They must see to it that the masses were educated to do no more than read road signs, though a reasonable living standard for them was in the German interest.57 The south of the Ukraine, in particular the Crimea, would be settled by German farmer-soldiers. He would have no worries at all about deporting the existing population somewhere or other to make room for them. The vision was of a latter-day feudal type of settlement: there would be a standing army of 1½-2 million men, providing some 30–40,000 every year for use each year when their twelve-year service was completed. If they were sons of farmers, they would be given a farmstead, fully equipped, by the Reich in return for their twelve years of military service. They would also be provided with weapons. The only condition was that they must marry country-not town-girls.58 German peasants would live in beautiful settlements, linked by good roads to the nearest town. Beyond this would be ‘the other world’ where the Russians lived under German subjugation. Should there be a revolution, ‘all we need to do is drop a few bombs on their cities and the business will be over’.59 After ten years, he foresaw, there would be a German élite, to be counted on when there were new tasks to be undertaken. ‘A new type of man will come to the fore, real master-types, who of course can’t be used in the west: viceroys.’60 German administrators would be housed in splendid buildings; the governors would live in ‘palaces’.61

  His musings on the prospect of a German equivalent of India continued on three successive days and nights from 8–11 August. India had given the English pride. The vast spaces had obliged them to rule millions with only a few men. ‘What India was for England, the eastern territory will be for us,’ he declared.62

  For Hitler, India was the heart of an empire that had brought Britain not only power, but prosperity. Ruthless economic exploitation had always been central to his dream of the German empire in the east. Now, it seemed, that dream would soon become reality. ‘The Ukraine and then the Volga basin will one day be the granaries of Europe,’ he foresaw. ‘And we’ll also provide Europe with iron. If Sweden won’t supply it one of these days, good, then we’ll take it from the east.63 Belgian industry can exchange its products – cheap consumer wares – for corn from these areas. From Thuringia and the Harz mountains, for example, we can remove our poor working-class families to give them big stretches of land (große Räume).’64 ‘We’ll be an exporter of corn for all in Europe who need it,’ he went on, a month later. ‘In the Crimea we will have citrus fruits, rubber plants (with 40,000 hectares we’ll make ourselves independent), and cotton. The Pripet marches will give us reeds. We will deliver to the Ukrainians head-scarves, glass chains as jewellery, and whatever else colonial peoples like. We Germans – that’s the main thing – must form a closed community like a fortress. The lowest stable-lad must be superior to any of the natives…’65

  Autarky, in Hitler’s thinking, was the basis of security. And the conquest of the east, as he had repeatedly stated in the mid-1920s, would now offer Germany that security. ‘The struggle for hegemony in the world will be decided for Europe through the occupation of the Russian space,’ he told his entourage in mid-September. ‘This makes Europe the firmest place in the world against the threat of blockade.’66 He returned to the theme a few days later. ‘As soon as I recognize a raw material as important for the war, I put every effort into making us independent in it. Iron, coal, oil, corn, livestock, wood – we must have them at our disposal… Today I can say: Europe is self-sufficient, as long as we just prevent another mammoth state existing which could utilize European civilization to mobilize Asia against us.’ He compared, as he had frequently done many years earlier, the benefits of autarky with the international market economy and the mistakes, as he saw them, made by Britain and America through their dependence upon exports and overseas markets, bringing cut-throat competition, corresponding high tariffs and production costs, and unemployment. Britain had increased unemployment and impoverished its working class by the error of industrializing India, he continued. Germany was not tied to exports, and this had meant that it was the only country without unemployment. ‘The country that we are now opening up is for us only a raw-material source and marketing area, not a
field for industrial production… We won’t need any more to look for an active (aufnahmefähigen) market in the Far East. Here is our market. We simply need to secure it. We’ll deliver cotton goods, cooking-pots, all simple articles for satisfying the demand for the necessities of life. We won’t be able to produce anything like so much as can be marketed here. I see there great possibilities for the build-up of a strong Reich, a true world-power… For the next few hundred years we will have a field of activity without equal.’67

  Hitler was blunt about his justification for conquering this territory: might was right. A culturally superior people, deprived of ‘living space’, needed no further justification.68 It was for him, as always, a matter of the ‘laws of nature’. ‘If I harm the Russians now, then for the reason that they would otherwise harm me,’ he declared. ‘The dear God, once again, makes it like that. He suddenly casts the masses of humanity on to the earth and each one has to look after himself and how he gets through. One person takes something away from the other. And at the end you can only say that the stronger wins. That is after all the most sensible order of things.’69

  There would be no end of the struggle in the east, that was clear, even after a German victory. Hitler spoke of building an ‘Eastern Wall’ along the Urals as a barrier against sudden inroads from the ‘dangerous human reservoir’ in Asia. It would be no conventional fortification, but a live wall built of the soldier-farmers who would form the new eastern settlers. A permanent border struggle in the east will produce a solid stock and prevent us from sinking back into the softness of a state system based purely on Europe.’70 War was for Hitler the essence of human activity. ‘What meeting a man means for a girl,’ he declared, ‘war meant for him.’71 He referred back frequently in these weeks to his own experiences in the First World War, probably the most formative of his life. Looking at the newsreel of the ‘Battle of Kiev’, he was completely gripped by ‘a heroic epic such as there had never previously been’. He immediately then added (in flat contradiction) that it had been like that in what he always called ‘the World War’, but that nobody had been able to record it in the same way for posterity. ‘I’m immensely happy to have experienced the war in this way,’ he added. 72 If he could wish the German people one thing, he remarked on another occasion, it would be to have a war every fifteen to twenty years. If reproached for the loss of 200,000 lives, he would reply that he had enlarged the German nation by 2½ million, and felt justified in demanding the sacrifice of the lives of a tenth. ‘Life is horrible (grausam). Coming into being, existing, and passing away, there’s always a killing (ein Töten). Everything that is born must later die. Whether it’s through illness, accident, or war, that remains the same.’73